As a fellow gopher, I agree, Go isn't trying to compete with C/C++ on performance, it's trying to give you safety and ease of use of high level language.

I think the point about concurrency typifies this, channels aren't as fast as mutexs and semaphores, but it makes sharing code with co workers easier to reason about.

If you're in a domain where performance is still king, Go isn't trying to find a place there.